The Japanese term for traditional sweets often served with tea is wagashi. The word combines wa, meaning Japanese, with kashi, meaning confectionery or sweets. Wagashi commonly emphasizes seasonality, elegant shapes, and plant-based ingredients such as azuki bean paste, rice flour, sugar, and agar.
Wagashi developed alongside Japanese tea culture, especially from the Muromachi period onward, and reached much of its modern form during the Edo period (1603–1868). Tea ceremony sweets are designed to balance the bitterness of matcha, while their colors and forms often evoke flowers, weather, festivals, or literary themes.
Wagashi is a broad category, not one specific recipe. Daifuku, dango, dorayaki, yokan, and nerikiri can all be classified as wagashi. A common mix-up is treating mochi as a synonym for wagashi: mochi is a particular rice-based food, while wagashi includes many sweets that contain no mochi at all. Western-style Japanese sweets are generally called yogashi.